We know all about Minecraft’s past and present: 70m sales across computers, consoles and mobile devices, and a burgeoning community of players, YouTubers, educators and independent developers doing interesting things with developer Mojang’s game.

Minecon 2015: day two of the annual Minecraft conference - live

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Mojang provided fans with some details during its Minecon 2015 conference in London this morning, in an hour-long session focusing on Minecraft for computers and consoles, and its Pocket Edition for smartphones and tablets.

A panel session saw Mojang’s Owen Hill, Daniel Wustenhoff, Tommaso Checchi, Jens Bergensten and Nathan Adams talk about upcoming features, and take questions from an audience that was around two thirds adults and a third children - a reflection of Minecraft’s player community.

Among the changes: a harder-to-beat Ender Dragon monster towards the end of the game in its desktop incarnation.

“The Ender Dragon right now in the PC edition is not right. You go to the end, you break a few blocks, then you hit him over the head a couple of times,” admitted Adams, promising a tougher challenge for players, and also the ability to respawn the dragon at will if they craft the necessary item.

Mojang also showed off a new area of the game for players to visit with a doomy yellow, purple and black colour scheme, and new trees that can be mined for “chorus fruit”, which in turn can create more new blocks.

The company is introducing a new mob called the Shulker, which sits inside a block that opens up, and shoots shuriken-styke projectiles at players that bounce off walls and travel round corners.

Mojang showed a demo of a player leaping upwards - using another new feature, a levitation effect - and fending off a battery of projectiles:

Minecraft players will also soon be able to quickly swap between different weapons and items in their character’s right and left hands, and also to carry shields and craft banners to customise them - a much-requested feature from players.

On smartphones and tablets, Mojang will soon release an update adding the main game’s entire Nether region, complete with its mobs and items, to the Pocket Edition.

Also coming soon: support for physical controllers - “Real buttons!” said Wustenhoff. Meanwhile, Checchi confirmed that Minecraft: Pocket Edition will get full use of the game’s redstone material by the end of this year.

On desktop and console, redstone can be dropped as dust to create circuits that transmit power, in one of the game’s most creative features. Until now, the Pocket Edition has only been able to use redstone for crafting objects, rather than as dust circuits.

Wustenhoff and Checchi also confirmed that Mojang is working on bringing its Realms service - where players pay a monthly subscription to manage their own private Minecraft servers to play on with friends - to the Pocket Edition. “It was meant to be in the next update, but we didn’t get around to it,” said Checchi.

Mojang staff on stage at Minecon 2015. Photograph: Stuart Dredge for the Guardian

Not every player request is being answered, of course. Adams politely knocked back one suggestion from the crowd that Mojang allow the Ender Dragon to spawn a baby version of itself.

“A baby dragon would be too cute to kill! He’d be flying around destroying your world, and you’d be like ‘Aah!’,” he said.